


Bathroom Confessions of a Six-Foot Strikeout

by youshallnotfinditso



Category: The Social Network (2010)
Genre: Compulsory Heterosexuality, Drunkenness, Internalized Homophobia, Other, Pre-Slash, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-16 15:27:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29455971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youshallnotfinditso/pseuds/youshallnotfinditso
Summary: Divya's roommate was actively cursed. The guy was six-foot-five, built like a draft horse, flossed his teeth, called his mother on weekends, and apologized for things like walking too loudly before Divya’s morning alarm went off. Girls should’ve been throwing their bras at him like he was every Backstreet Boy rolled into one and tied off with a trust-fund financed silk ribbon. But Divya had never met a hot guy who was as bad at talking to girls as Cameron Winklevoss. It defied belief.(Or, the various methods Divya attempts to get his roommate laid, with equally varying levels of success).
Relationships: Divya Narendra/Cameron Winklevoss
Comments: 12
Kudos: 19
Collections: The Prompt Network





	Bathroom Confessions of a Six-Foot Strikeout

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Fake It 'til You Break It](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26515636) by [evol_love](https://archiveofourown.org/users/evol_love/pseuds/evol_love), [phonecallfromgod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phonecallfromgod/pseuds/phonecallfromgod), [youshallnotfinditso](https://archiveofourown.org/users/youshallnotfinditso/pseuds/youshallnotfinditso). 



> This fic can be read as a standalone, or as a prequel to my other The Social Network fic Fake It 'til You Break It, cowritten with phonecallfromgod and evol_love

Divya had never met a hot guy who was as bad at talking to girls as Cameron Winklevoss. It defied belief. 

The guy was six-foot-five, built like a draft horse, flossed his teeth, called his mother on weekends, and apologized for things like walking too loudly before Divya’s morning alarm went off. Girls should’ve been throwing their bras at him like he was every Backstreet Boy rolled into one and tied off with a trust-fund financed silk ribbon.

Instead, Divya found himself trying not to laugh as the _third_ girl his roommate struck up a conversation with at this Phoenix pre-punch party made a thinly veiled excuse and turned on her heel, heading for the stairs like she couldn’t even stand to be on the same floor as Cam for one more minute.

“The fuck did you do this time?” Divya asked, not even remotely pretending he wasn’t hovering to watch the devastation.

Cam looked sheepish. “She brought up four movies I haven’t seen, and I didn’t think acting like I’d seen them when I hadn’t was the wisest course of action.”

Oh, Divya could already see where this was headed. 

“Sooo, you asked her to tell you about them, right?” He prompted, grinning.

“Ah, no, I. I explained that I don’t have a lot of free time to see movies. Because I row crew.”

“And?”

“And then I ... started talking ….. about crew.”

“And there’s where you lost her,” Divya laughed, slapping Cam on the back. 

Cam shook his head good-naturedly. “Isn’t being an athlete supposed to be a selling point? That was all I ever heard about in high school, did that all change behind my back suddenly?”

“Cameron, Cam, my man,” Divya said with the half-tilt full-throttle focus of someone two beers and five shots into his evening, “you can’t just _say_ you’re an athlete. It’s like … having a six pack, or a big dick or, I don’t know, it’s about the _discovery_.”

“Is that right?” Cam said, amused.

“You’re laughing but this is exactly the same as all your little cotillion niceties. Except it ends with getting laid. So it’s practical. And need I remind you,” Divya said, standing up a little straighter, “I have sexiled you _three times_.”

This was not a body count Divya would have been altogether that proud of under normal circumstances, except for the fact that it was _three more times_ than the Olympic-bound Abercrombie & Fitch model he was rooming with. 

That was to say, Cam had bagged a grand total of zero hotties since the beginning of sophomore year, which was almost six months ago. And that was insane.

“You have,” Cameron said solemnly, head dipping in one of those bro nods Divya never, _ever_ thought he’d be the recipient of as a high school geek. “And if you have any more wisdom to impart, I’m all ears.”

“If I’m being honest with you, man, the fucking, uh, the fucking _thesis_ of my technique is like, ‘Hey I know I don’t look like one of these handsome assholes,’” Divya said, slapping Cam on the back again. _God_ , Divya was so much drunker than he’d planned on getting. “But give me a chance anyway.”

Cam steadied him, laughing. “I think you’re underselling yourself.”

“No, no, I’m just saying, you can’t sell a secondhand Buick the same way you would a Beamer, you dig? But I can still sell the _fuck_ out of a secondhand Buick.” 

“Clearly,” Cam said as Divya downed the last of his second beer. Cam took the empty bottle out of his hand and set it on a tray, which was nice of him. He was so _nice_. Why the fuck was he so bad at getting laid?

“Why the fuck _are_ you so bad at getting laid?” Divya blurted out, because it was just absolutely beyond him. He couldn’t puzzle it out.

Cam’s ears went bright red. Whoops. He was going to go all stiff and formal now. That was the most annoying operating mode of Cam.

“Sorry,” Cam said, and Divya shook his head so hard it made him a little dizzy.

“Don’t be sorry, you’re a fucking BMW, don’t apologize to me for being an asshole.”

“Do you need some water?” Cam asked, deflecting the way he always did when someone complimented him on something that wasn’t crew. Mr. Fucking Manners over here with the modesty.

“Maybe, but _you_ should be drunker right now. Wasn’t that the whole point of tonight? That you can actually get drunk?”

Crew had been cancelled the next morning due to inclement weather, so naturally, all the boys on the crew team were _not_ covering their cars and bunkering down in safety, but rather hitting the town with everything they had. 

“At this point I’m used to being the resident sober party,” Cam said, shrugging, dipping his head as if to say _What can you do?_

“Well that’s problem number one, brother, c’mon,” Divya said, thumping him on the chest for emphasis. Cam looked down at where Divya had thunked him and then back up. Maybe that had helped the point sink in. Weren’t crew guys always putting each other in headlocks and running each other into trees and shit? Maybe he needed to approach this like a jock.

“We need to get you out of your comfort zone,” Divya instructed, and Cam actually nodded along. Right, awesome, this was working. Athletes were good at taking direction, Divya just needed to talk like an athlete. “But first,” he declared, because this was the secret sauce, this was _key_ , “we need to do some fucking math.”

“So if your strikeout rate increases at a rate of 0.03 per 240 minutes,” Divya said, scrawling on a cocktail napkin while Cam downed a tumbler of Dalmore single malt scotch like it was apple juice, “and variable _N_ functions as your objective hotness on a scale of 1 to 100, where are we ranking you?”

“Oh, jesus,” Cam muttered, a flush rising high in his cheeks.

“Would it be easier to rank Tyler and then just add ten?”

“I don’t think I’m ten points higher than Tyler, we’re identical twins,” Cameron said, which Divya probably should have predicted from the guy he’d once heard tell his brother, ‘No I think we’re both Dad’s favorite.’

“You dress better, you actually style your hair, my first impression of you was not you ruffling my hair like a douchebag, and I’ve never seen you put ketchup on white rice and then eat it like some kind of sick freak.”

“Oh, I have done that,” Cameron said, subdued.

“Jesus christ what is wrong with you people,” Divya muttered under his breath. “Okay, seven points higher than Tyler, since at least you have the good sense to be ashamed.

“I won’t do it again,” Cameron promised solemnly.

“See, and that’s why you’re the hotter twin,” Divya said, and then had to physically stop himself from cringing. Cam didn’t look fazed, but fuck, Divya was really going to need to watch his drunken mouth right now.

The thing was, Divya was not in love with his roommate, but he _did_ have eyes. And maybe, once in a while, he entertained this desperate fantasy of Cam getting fed up with his months-long dry spell and letting Divya suck him off at his desk chair.

A little pathetic, but c’mon, Divya was only human. And he wasn’t pining after him or anything. Divya had a perfectly fine handle on his own love life, thank you very much. And Cam was moving rapidly out of ‘shockingly decent roommate, for a crew dude’ territory and into the territory of someone Divya would actually make an effort to see during breaks, someone he was genuinely interested in staying friends with and hanging out with.

And it didn’t hurt that Cam had the kind of connections that could get them into a Phoenix pre-punch party.

Divya was not interested in screwing any of that up, no matter how good Cam looked in athletic pants and no shirt. 

“Let me have a frame of reference here,” Cameron suggested. “Where do you rank yourself?”

“Right now? Sixty-seven, easy,” Divya said. “I actually dressed for this. Not the best of the best, but I can clean up.”

“I think you could go higher than sixty-seven,” Cameron said like the nice asshole he was.

“Let’s just put you at ninety-four,” Divya muttered to himself, filling in the blank spaces he’d left in the equation.

“That high, really?” Cam squinted at him like he was displeased.

“The higher you rank, the worse off you are, don’t get too excited,” Divya said, scribbling out his calculations. 

“That doesn’t seem right,” Cam said, which had to mean the alcohol was starting to hit him. Actually arguing back wasn’t in his society programming. “People make more excuses for people they find attractive. They let them get away with more.”

“For most people,” Divya agreed, flipping the napkin over and scrawling across the back. “ _You_ don’t know how to utilize that, so you shoot yourself in the foot.”

“But how do I fix that?” Cam asked. “I can’t just have a different face.”

“You’re right, but Tyler’s seven points less hot than you because he dresses worse,” Divya said, taking a thoughtful sip of rum and Coke. “We just need to find a way to roughen you up around the edges and throw you off your game. Just nine points down, that’ll buy you fifteen more minutes of conversation time. And at that point it’s pretty hard to scare off someone who’s looking for a one night stand.” 

“You seem pretty certain about this.”

Divya waved the cocktail napkin. “My math is never wrong. Get over here.”

Cam acquiesced with an expression of profound amusement, like this was all very much beneath him but he was willing to humor Divya. _Asshole_. To his credit, though, he did let Divya fuck up his hair, take his tie pin, and untuck his shirt.

He still looked exceedingly hot. Exceedingly, unfairly, untouchably hot.

“Okay, close your eyes,” Divya warned, and Cam was either drunker than Divya thought or actually trusted him, because he did it without asking questions. Divya almost felt bad for what was going to come next.

Almost.

Divya tossed the glass of rum and Coke in Cameron’s face.

“The _hell!_ ” Cameron sputtered, swiping carbonated alcohol out of his eyes. The shirt he had on was definitely toast, whoops. Good thing he could afford to replace it.

“You’ll thank me later!” Divya promised, and bodily shoved him out of their little alcove and into a group of people socializing.

This was almost definitely Cam’s worst nightmare. Not being on his most perfect social A-game was bad enough _without_ being sticky, and a group of girls started very non-subtly laughing at him.

“C’mon Cam,” Divya muttered to himself, watching as a pretty brunette with a sweet, heart-shaped face approached him and pulled something out of her purse.

She held a package of wipes toward him. Holy shit, this was actually _working_. Cam said something, and they both laughed. She took him by the hand and led him over to a sofa at the edge of the room. Divya watched her stand over Cam and wipe at his face, tilting his chin up sweetly. Yeah, Divya didn’t blame her, it was a nice face.

After a couple aborted attempts to get the stain out of his shirt, the girl gave up on helping him but didn’t give up on Cam. She straddled him on the couch and Cam pulled her down into his lap.

They kissed and Divya looked away, his face too warm. 

He supposed it was time to go socialize for himself, since his work here was clearly done. But he felt weird about leaving Cam. He had this odd, seasick pull in the pit of his stomach, like if he wandered too far away he’d get lost in the crowd, in the dizzying spin of it all. 

Fuck, he was too drunk.

He wanted Cam to come back so they could go home. Or so they could get more drunk, just, together. Or maybe what he wanted was to sit next to Cam while he made out with that girl, go off with them when they went upstairs to hook up, keep giving Cam instructions, tell him where to put his hands and what to do with his mouth, and—

He was really getting away from himself. 

This was a Phoenix pre-punch party, and Cam was his roommate. The only reason Divya had even gotten his foot in the door was because of Cam, because Cam and his brother had been invited and Tyler was on a date tonight instead. He could not screw this up for himself.

Divya got himself some water and put his game face back on.

Talking about his embarrassing high school rock’n’roll phase was almost always a ticket in with fratty guys, even when it came to dodging the usual pointed, ‘are you even _allowed_ to have nose piercings, like, culturally?’ bullshit, so Divya was doing pretty well for himself by the time he saw Cam’s girl laughing it up with some friends, Cameron himself nowhere to be found.

“Uh, hang on a minute, I need to take this,” Divya said, barely making the effort to fake pulling out his phone before hauling ass to the third level, where the hookup pads and bathrooms were.

On a whim, Divya went for a bathroom door that had the same location in this hallway as their door in their dorm, four doors down on the left. It seemed as good a place to start as any, so he knocked.

“Occupied,” Cam’s voice called, terse.

“It’s Div, man, open the door.”

“Get it yourself,” Cam snapped, which was the rudest thing Divya had ever heard him say to someone who wasn’t his brother. Something was definitely up.

The door was locked when Divya tried it, so he pulled out his wallet, hoping he still had the muscle memory from his latchkey kid years. He pulled out his high school student ID and jimmied the lock, working at it for an embarrassingly long time until the lock clicked and the ancient door creaked open.

“Just go away,” Cam moaned from the floor.

“Did you throw up on her?” Divya asked, boosting himself with his arms and sitting up on the marble sink top. He eased the door shut with his foot.

“No, it just didn’t work out,” Cam said hopelessly, and jesus, was the guy actively cursed?

“ _How_ ,” Divya said, disbelieving. “I got you _so far_ , what the hell _happened?!_ ”

“Divya, it just. Didn’t. Work out,” Cam repeated tersely. 

Divya’s math was never wrong. There had to be a variable he wasn’t accounting for.

“Are you sabotaging yourself or something? Maybe without realizing it?” Divya asked.

Cam gagged. He must’ve gotten more drunk at some point, because he actually kind of reeked of bourbon. 

“Dude, are you good?” He asked as Cam choked and recovered, his breathing going all ragged. He didn’t answer, and his breathing never leveled off. At some point it seemed like he was crying a little bit and Divya had no idea what the fuck to do with that.

“I hate making out with girls,” Cam said finally, which sent Divya reeling. Girls, plural? What other girls had there _been?_

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Divya suggested gently.

“No I do, I do, or people notice. Like you, or …. just, people. They always notice. They always figure it out. But then the girls figure it out anyway, they always _know_ when I don’t … when I can’t— ”

“Uh, don’t freak out,” Divya said cautiously. “But are you gay?”

Cam was quiet for a long time. Every so often he’d take in a deep breath like he wanted to say something, and then they’d fall back into silence.

“Cam?” Divya asked.

“You’re gonna think this is so stupid,” Cam said miserably.

Jesus. Was that really what Cam thought of him? 

“I wouldn’t think that at all,” he promised.

“I just thought, maybe,” he trailed off, squeezing his eyes shut. “I thought I could grow out of it.”

There was a lot Divya could say to that. The first being that in Divya’s own experience, wanting to kiss guys wasn’t something you grew out of even if you _liked_ kissing girls. And maybe a more selfless person would have opened up and shared about that, but the thing was, as much as Divya liked Cam, it was kind of fucking terrifying to see how much he hated this part of himself.

Divya liked Cam. He really did. He wanted to be friends with him and he liked spending time with him. But Divya had self-preservation instincts too, and right now everything in him was screaming to lay low, to not give this six-foot-five Harvard old boy an external conduit to exorcise something he hated about himself.

And fuck, he didn’t want Cam to be wary of him. Like he'd said, he liked Cam.

“I think we should go home,” Divya said, because athletes liked instructions and Cam looked like he could use something familiar right now.

“I don’t know if I can get up,” Cam moaned plaintively.

“When I said you should live a little, I did not fucking mean get so trashed you have to get carried home by someone eight inches shorter than you,” Divya snapped.

“Sorry, sorry,” Cam whispered, and Divya rolled his eyes as he jumped down from the sink. 

Divya pulled Cam’s phone out of his pocket. “What’s your brother’s number?”

“Wait, don’t call Ty, he has a date,” Cam said, eyes unfocused.

Divya was not a good person, but good people didn’t get shit done. “But you asked me to call Ty,” Divya lied firmly.

Cam’s Darling Little Socialite Training kicked in, his mouth opening and shutting, perplexed. Divya could tell he wanted to argue but was too confused to, and the instinct to smooth things over won out.

“He’s number one on speed dial,” Cam said, dazed but instinctively helpful.

Tyler Winklevoss didn’t pick up until the eighth ring. Fucker.

“Cam, this better be important,” he said, and even after a few months for Divya to familiarize himself with the fact that his roommate had a twin, it was still jarring to be looking at Cam and hearing the same voice speak to him through the phone.

“Tyler, this is Divya Narendra speaking, Cameron’s roommate.”

“Diiiiiv, hi,” Tyler said, drawing the syllables out in a way that could either have been friendly or dangerous.

“Your brother’s a little indisposed at the moment, that’s actually why I need your help.”

“So I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Divya, but there’s a torrential downpour occurring just outside.”

“I don’t have time for this fucking cat and mouse shit, okay? Jesus christ,” Divya snapped.

“Don’t fight,” Cam moaned from the floor.

“Was that Cam? Is he dying? Tell him he’d better be dying.”

“He’s too drunk to walk, actually, and as you mentioned before, it’s raining outside, so if you want him home in one piece it might be in your best interest to _help me the fuck out._ ”

Fortunately for Divya, though less so for Cam, Cameron getting plastered was an uncommon enough occurrence to motivate Tyler to get to the Phoenix mansion in under ten minutes.

“You owe me so big for this, you have no idea,” Tyler muttered darkly as they maneuvered Cam to Tyler’s car. Divya wasn’t sure if Tyler was talking to Cam or Divya, so he stayed quiet and let it fall on Cam’s shoulders.

Tyler made them wait while he retrieved a blanket from the trunk to lay out over his passenger seat — “You are _not_ getting booze on my interior, absolutely not,” — but once they were safely inside and the heat kicked on, Divya would have forgiven him for anything.

“You hit on someone’s girlfriend or something?” Tyler asked at one point, jerking his head at the general state of Cameron, and it took Divya a moment to remember throwing his drink in Cam’s face.

That felt like years ago.

“That was just Div,” Cameron murmured sleepily, and Tyler’s eyes met Divya’s in the rearview mirror, cold and poisonous and staggeringly blue as antifreeze.

It was another concentrated effort to get Cameron upstairs and into dry pajamas, and as much as Divya had felt at odds with Tyler in the car, they made a remarkably good team once they had a shared goal. 

“Could I have a word with you outside?” Tyler asked once Cam was in bed, and Divya’s guard had dropped enough that he wasn’t prepared for Tyler’s face to go steely the moment the door shut.

“Why’d you throw a drink in his face?” Tyler crossed his arms, biceps flexing like boa constrictors. “We gonna have a problem?”

Divya dug through his pockets for the cocktail napkin, which he’d folded up small enough for it to actually escape the seep of rainwater through his pockets. “So this might sound insane, but we were doing Applied Mathematics,” he said, and handed the napkin over.

To his credit, Tyler did take it, squinting at Divya’s spikey handwriting in an actual attempt to follow along. “Tyler 10 points lower than Cam? What’s that about?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

“No, wait, hang on, I’m totally hotter than Cam, the fuck’s this?”

“We had a theory that if he was more approachable he’d have a better chance scoring tonight,” Divya explained while Tyler was distracted. “And then we tested it. With rum and Coke.”

Tyler looked up, balling the napkin up in his fist. “Did it work?”

“Pretty well, yeah.”

“And then he got trashed?”

So Tyler _did_ know about Cam’s issues.

“Right, exactly.”

Tyler looked Divya right in the eye, and Divya could feel himself being assessed. 

“So, the thing about Cam and girls,” Tyler said, and Divya wondered if he’d passed whatever test Tyler had run him through, if he was about to be brought into the fold, “is that Cam’s pretty sensitive.”

Ah, apparently not.

“So I appreciate your little operation here, but that’s not going to work for Cam. He doesn’t do the whole one night stand thing. He’ll try, but he gets all fucked up about it.” 

“Noted,” Divya said, clipped. 

Tyler looked a little surprised at the attitude, softened a bit. “You should call me though, if you need a wingman. You have my number, right?”

“Uh, no, that’s why I had to bully Cam into letting me use his phone.”

Tyler laughed. “You know, you manage him pretty well, all things considered.”

Divya would’ve rolled his eyes at the backhanded compliment, but all was forgiven as Tyler pulled him up in his own phone contacts. Divya felt a little spark of warmth at the fact that his name was saved as _Div (Cams)_.

“Do you have a texting plan? Let me text you, just save my number,” he said, so sincerely Divya couldn’t help but be charmed. “And I mean it, call me if you ever want a wingman.”

“I’ll think about it,” Divya said, surprised to find that he actually wanted to. 

Divya let himself back into the dorm quietly, trying to return the favor when it came to all the sneaking around Cam did every morning after crew.

There had to be a way to signal to Cam that he could talk to him, he thought as he changed into pajamas. That they could do more than that, if they wanted.

Tyler had seemed pretty supportive about the whole thing, and Tyler _had_ promised to wingman for Divya, but he doubted that service would extend to his own brother.

“Div?” Cam said from a few feet over, and Divya jumped. He hadn’t realized Cam was still awake.

“What’s up, man?”

“Are you mad?”

“Why would I be mad?”

Cam sighed, like he’d just wanted a yes or no answer and this was going to take more effort than he had to expend. 

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “Do you know?”

“Yeah,” Divya said carefully, taking pity on him. “But I’m not mad. Are you mad at me?”

“There’s nothing to— why am I mad at you?”

“You know,” Divya repeated, heart beating faster. If Cam wanted to play games, he’d play games, but that didn’t mean there was nothing at stake.

“No I don’t,” Cam said, alarmed. “I don’t … no, I don’t know.”

“Okay,” Divya said.

“I’m not mad,” Cam said quickly.

“Okay,” Divya repeated.

They were quiet for a long time, but Divya knew Cameron was still awake. He listened to his breathing, waiting for his breaths to even out, his heartbeat picking up speed as they never did.

“Hey, Cam?” He said finally, like he was reaching across the gap between them. 

“Yeah?” Cam said quickly, like he’d been waiting for it. 

“We’ll talk in the morning,” Divya promised after a long pause, drifting off to the sound of rain falling and Cameron’s breathing leveling off into sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Much love to my girlfriend for spending Valentine's Day listening to me talk about The Social Network, and to my best friends phonecallfromgod and evol_love for everything that lead to this fic's existence. Much love to you all.


End file.
